WTF is a Mukbang?

Okay I have to admit, here at UTM, we have a huge obsession with mukbang videos!! I never knew what is was until about a year ago. Let's explore WTF is a Mukbang?

Slurping, chewing, chomping, and binging. Would you watch others scarf down large platefuls of foods? Thousands of people are watching these videos called, Mukbang.

What is a Mukbang? It’s a YouTube trend from South Korea that started around 2010. In a mukbang video, the YouTuber eats loads of food while narrating and interacting with their audience. While the craze started in South Korea, it’s migrated across the world. And believe it or not, these food-crazed YouTube stars are making a lot of money eating food!

A very popular Mukbanger, and one of our favorites is Bethany Gaskin aka BLove (@bloveslife2). She refers to herself as the "queen of seafood boils". She does mukbang videos on YouTube for a living. Yes a Living! This woman has made over a million dollars from doing mukbang and selling her own seafood boil sauce.

Blove finds great joy in eating 15 pound lobsters (by herself), two triple cheese burgers, onion rings and a large order of chili cheese fries (by herself), 30 chicken wings (by herself), huge amounts of shrimps and lobster tails dipped in a large bowl of butter sauce (by herself) the list goes on. She recently started to have celebrity guests on her videos that love to eat as much as she does.

A lot of people cannot stand the noise of a Mukbang. In the videos they purposefully use exaggerated noises to capture the sounds of eating, drinking, biting, chewing, and more. While that can be uncomfortable for some (it is for me!), this is another growing genre of video trends: ASMR videos. ASMR stands for “autonomous sensory meridian response.” That’s a fancy way of saying you enjoy relaxing to the sounds of every life, from the sound of eating to the sound of brushing hair.

Is Mukbang your style? Take a look at several mukbang videos and let us know.